


Out of the Black

by girlwolf



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, F/M, I built a ship out of a dumpster and sailed it into a beautiful maritime sunset, Karen Page's practical tips for thwarting a mugging, Slow Burn, The UST will become RST eventually, Unresolved Sexual Tension, kastle - Freeform, must love dogs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2018-05-30 07:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6414136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlwolf/pseuds/girlwolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If the dreams felt like recapitulation – like she was reliving something, trying to work out a secret meaning – maybe she could have written them off more easily. If the dreams had been stranger, more sublime or surreal, she could safely categorize them as symbolic, the way dreams are supposed to be. But why is she dreaming about, say, a grocery store? Why, in the dream of a grocery store, does Frank Castle come to greet her with an armful of leeks and a case of beer? It’s just so specific. And the little things are always right – the way, for example, that he always smells like coffee, and leather, and charcoal, and something a little more acrid that she remembers but can’t quite name.  </p><p>The point is, for a dead man and a known killer, he sure is hard to shake, and it’s not for lack of trying. </p><p>***</p><p>This is the story of how: 1) a dead guy just can't quite stick to the shadows; 2) Karen Page learns, by necessity, how to throw a punch; 3) we all learn, by necessity, not to tell a woman what she is and isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

 _With the headlights burning_  
_Looking up for something_  
_Something that we're needing_

 _Still the question lingers_  
_I twist it round my fingers_  
_Could you be my calling?_

**PJ Harvey, "The Slow Drug"**

 

***

 

Karen’s dreams, lately, are so vivid they feel more like memories come the morning – stupid, mundane, well-lit dreams, things she really might have lived. Pushing a cart at the hardware store, shouldering through a crowd while her second favorite band plays live, that kind of thing. He’s always there, and it’s starting to piss her off. Half the time when her alarm jolts her awake, she expects to sit up from her bed and see him sleeping on the couch. Or, having fallen asleep on the couch and suddenly woken at 3 am with a crick in her neck, half-thinks she’ll turn and he’ll be paused in the kitchen, glowing yellow in the light of an opened refrigerator door, looking for something.

In fact, she hasn’t seen him since the night he saved the Devil’s life – _Matt’s_ life, she silently corrects herself, swallowing slightly as she always does when she is forced to remember that part. In any case: she had told Frank Castle he would be dead to her if he did the thing he was going to do – the thing he had to do. And sure enough, the last time she saw him he was up on that roof – too far for voices to carry, she had only the sight of him – ascended after all. Some beastly avenging angel. And then he was gone as fast as he’d arrived, Hell’s Kitchen’s own violent miracle.

If the dreams felt like recapitulation – like she was reliving something, trying to work out a secret meaning – maybe she could have written them off more easily. If the dreams had been stranger, more sublime or surreal, she could safely categorize them as _symbolic_ , the way dreams are supposed to be. But why is she dreaming about, say, a grocery store? Why, in the dream of a grocery store, does Frank Castle come to greet her with an armful of leeks and a case of beer? It’s just so _specific_. And the little things are always right – the way, for example, that he always smells like coffee, and leather, and charcoal, and something a little more acrid that she remembers but can’t quite name.

The point is, for a dead man and a known killer, he sure is hard to shake, and it’s not for lack of trying.

 

***

 

People always seem to be reminding her that “The Punisher” does not take his name lightly. That he is a brute, wild-card enforcer of his own personal justice – that he acts relentlessly, lethally. Matt can’t get close enough anymore to moralize at her, but Foggy, if he detects a glint of sympathy in her when he mentions Castle’s name, takes the opportunity to list the man's accumulated dead. She tolerates it for a moment or two, but always cuts him off quickly – not because she suddenly feels some twinge of guilt, but because when he says the names it's ferociously delivered, somber as a litany, and just about as Catholic as Matt on his most self-serious days. In other words, it's not _really_ about Frank -- though when it comes to Castle, she understands why Foggy must be so rigid: as someone with faith in the system (not to mention six figures of law school debt), Foggy doesn’t have any option but to reject him entirely.

And anyway, it’s not just Foggy – people at the paper bring Punisher stories to her. They want her to write an exposé, a condemnation. She finds a way to demur. She wonders what it is about her that makes people think they need to explain Frank Castle’s particular evil to her in simple terms. On bad days, she fears she knows.

What if, she muses, they had been the ones who’d seen him thrashed and laid up in his hospital bed, or been sitting on the other side of the booth at the diner? What would _they_ have seen? Would they have gotten hung up on his boxer’s nose, his scars, his powerful shoulders – or would they have seen what she did, the dusting of dark dog hair against his dark clothes? Would they still need to believe so fiercely, then, in his inhumanity?

 

***

 

She’s cursing her impractical shoes as she strides quickly down the dark sidewalk, her heels clacking against the wet concrete like a frantic metronome. She has a fifteen minute window to meet her source – after quarter-of, before midnight – and she’s running late, which is probably why she doesn’t at first notice the footsteps closing in behind her. It’s only when a man appears from the corner ahead of her and walks quickly in her direction, tugging at something in his waistband, that she abruptly registers the danger. The two of them closing in. She steals a glance back and there’s a tall man with his hood pulled up, only a few steps away from closing the gap. The man walking toward her from the front has a bald-shaved white head that glints in the moonlight like another moon, his mouth pressed tight into a straight line. She tries to think fast. She stops. There’s a piece of concrete rubble to her right, and as she stoops to grab it she sees the man in front begin to slide a knife from his waistband. She grips the concrete in her hand and stands. But now the man with the knife has frozen. She looks back quickly behind her. The hood has fallen away from the man behind her and he has blanched, is staring into the darkness at the other side of the empty street. She watches the man with the knife follow his gaze, then, still looking into the dark, reverse his gesture, sliding the blade back into his pants and tugging his shirt down over the waistband.

After a few seconds, he seems to remember Karen. He glances at her and speaks for the first time. “My, uh, apologies ma’am. We…we thought you coulda been a damsel in distress.” And he turns abruptly on his heel and runs in the direction from which he came. Karen, feeling the thudding of her heart and her uneasy breathing for the first time, is still. The man behind her, she notices dizzily, is gone. What the fuck had just happened?

Jittery with adrenaline, not releasing the concrete chunk just yet, she peers into the space where the two men had seen something that frightened them, and all at once can make him out – a shadow hidden in a building’s shadow, visible – barely – only because of the white skull across his chest. “Frank,” she exhales. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath. She can swear she sees his eyes. Before she knows it he has vanished into the consuming dark. She drops the chunk of concrete, straightens her skirt, ties her hair back and continues on her way. She does not know if he heard her say his name. 


	2. Don't Call Me Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He closes the distance and hands her a cup and sits next to her on the small bench, a little too far apart for their shoulders to touch. They sip quietly. As Karen drains the last of her coffee, he finally asks the question:
> 
> “Anybody ever teach you to throw a punch?”

 

 _Ain't no hurry,_  
_Don't you worry -_  
_I ain't evil, I'm just bad._

 _Do you have a taste for danger?_  
_Suits me if you do._  
_Come on baby, don't call me stranger -_  
_I'm just like you._

  **Chris Smithers, "Don't Call Me Stranger"**

 

*******

 

From time to time during the months that Frank Castle remains dead, Karen thinks about this:

It’s one week after the almost-mugging, after he came and went as slick as a dream. It’s much later in the evening than she realizes and she’s nose deep in edits on a story. She reaches into her desk for a takeout menu in her bottom drawer and finds the first one, from her favorite place, dogeared in a way she hadn’t left it. She knows, of course, immediately. But her hands don’t even tremble as she pulls apart the folded menu. Under the “drinks” section, she sees a question mark scrawled inelegantly next to the word “coffee.” She flips the dogear up and below it a simple X - two cross streets, the northeast corner of a park not three blocks from where she was accosted - and the numbers 2300.

She checks her watch - 9:15. Less than two hours away from seeing Frank face to face.

 

***

 

He makes noise as he approaches the bench where she waits - on purpose, Karen knows, so he doesn’t scare her. But she won’t turn to him until he speaks.

“Here’s how I figure it,” he starts, raspy and sounding maybe a little more certain than he is. “You keep pointing your nose toward trouble like you are, you better be ready when trouble hunts you back.”

She turns then, just the slightest tilt of her head, just enough to see him in her peripheral vision - his hands holding two cups of black coffee steaming in the cool night.

“Who says I’m not ready?” she asks.

She can hear the smile in his voice - and something else welled up too, maybe - as he replies: “Ok, sure, Miss Page. You’re _ready_. You proved that more than once. But I guess I mean - you’d better be _prepared._ ”

He closes the distance and hands her a cup and sits next to her on the small bench, a little too far apart for their shoulders to touch. They sip quietly. As Karen drains the last of her coffee, he finally asks the question:

“Anybody ever teach you to throw a punch?”

 

***

 

_In the part of his head he tries to silence most days, he’s cursing Red endlessly. Matt Murdock thinks that he can protect Karen. And because of that, he’s never been able to keep her safe._

 

***

 

She feels somewhat self conscious - they barely exchanged ten words, and now his eyes are narrowed on her lower body as he repeats himself about the power in a punch coming from the hips. She’s standing in the grass barefoot now, in suit pants and a blouse, trying to move dangerously. He holds up his left hand, flat, and makes her jab again and again until he’s satisfied the punch isn’t coming from her elbow, it’s coming from the bottom of her feet. He shows her how to turn her hand so her hook hits with “10 to 15% more power, just from a little tweak.” He keeps chiding her to put her hands back up after she throws a punch.

She’s relaxing more and more, liking the feel of her knuckles slapping against his palms, the way he pushes his hands forward to catch her punches. He keeps saying that a fight almost never has to be a fight, that the best thing to do is run, or that sometimes all you have to do is square up, look like you know how to hit, before people leave you alone. But he’s still correcting her punches, telling her to hit harder, to hit with everything. She connects with a solid one-two-three that he likes the feel of. He looks up from her hips, meets her gaze, smiles without meaning to. “Attagirl.” She tries to fight showing the immediate, joyful burn in her chest then, but what’s she going to do but smile back?

When she hears a bell chime for midnight from the belfry of a church a few blocks away, she’s startled - it’s too real, a reminder of how short and how long their time together has been. The lesson may as well have lasted five minutes or three days. Frank suddenly drops his hands and glances away. His face changes. She waits for him to say something and he doesn’t.

“Frank,” she tries.

“You should always carry a gun.”

His tone is rough but his eyes are doing something different, something that reminds her of the way he spoke to her when he was laid up in the hospital all those months back.

“I -”

“Most people can’t handle it,” he interrupts, not looking her in the eye. “You can. Go to the firing range. Get as comfortable as you can, you know - get good.” He looks up, searches the skyline. "It'll happen again."

She swallows.

"I can’t always be there.”

Questions tumble over each other and lodge in her throat. She’s so angry with him, suddenly. She wants to scream at him - _why do you get to come and go like this? Why do you get to decide? Who gave you the right?_

She’s still in a boxer’s stance, her fists clenched at her sides. She shifts her weight from front to back foot and back again, waiting. Finally, he moves toward her, finally turns his eyes to hers. He places a hand lightly on her shoulder, and her whole body suddenly relaxes. She hadn’t realized how tautly she’d been holding herself together.

“Karen…”

Her mouth tightens. She closes her eyes.

“Don’t die, Frank.”

In the dark behind her eyelids, she feels only his hand lightly still on her. She feels his palm slide down her arm, just so, his fingers loosen and trace the muscle of her shoulder. It lifts away and then there’s silence.

He’s gone when she opens her eyes, as she knew he would be. She finds her shoes - she has to go back to the office, late as it is. There’s still work to do. When she lifts her bag it’s a little heavier than it was, and she silently makes a promise to Frank. She takes his kind of power seriously, and she’s learned not to underestimate herself.

And he said, _I can’t always_. Not _won’t._ _Can’t._

Though she’s not sure he can survive without anyone watching his back, she’s ready for whatever comes next. She’s Karen Page: she gets a target in her sights, and she goes at it with everything she has.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started this story A YEAR AND A HALF AGO and always wanted to write this scene but never got around to it. Now that the new season is out I figured it was time to make good on actually finishing it and writing the rest of the story. I'll update on Mondays. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm new, hello! I would like to speak with each and every one of you about how this ship has ruined my life.


End file.
